Journal of Pragmatics最新文献

This study investigates the speech act of refusals in the context of English as a lingua franca (ELF), with a focus on the strategies, internal modifications, and preference organization of refusals. Fifteen Chinese speakers of English and 15 Indonesian English speakers engaged in dyadic role-plays involving requests and refusals. Results show that when rejecting requests proposed by the Indonesian participants, Chinese English speakers heavily used indirect refusal strategies, such as explanations, alternatives, and apologies. These refusals often included internal modifications, particularly linguistic downgraders, to mitigate the force of their refusals. Sequentially, Chinese English speakers commonly organized their refusals as dispreferred, deferring the refusals via a cluster of interactional devices, including inter-turn gaps, turn-initial delays, anticipatory accounts, and pro forma agreements. The findings suggest that ELF refusals and ELF interactions are not necessarily direct with minimal mitigation as claimed in previous research (e.g., House, 2008; Murray, 2012), and ELF speakers, at least for Chinese English speakers, do linguistically and interactionally engage with interpersonal work despite the generally preferred communicative style of transparency and directness in ELF interactions. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications on ELF pragmatics instruction are also discussed.

In this paper we link between two scholarly traditions that share the goal of understanding how people accomplish the achievement of living together: linguistic-politeness and diplomacy. We look at a specific speech event—presidential introductory conversations during credential ceremonies, in which the interlocutors are simultaneously talking on behalf of themselves and the states they represent. On the basis of 23 introductory conversations at Israel’s presidential residence. We aim to understand how good relations are cultivated in diplomatic conversations and the resources and strategies hosting presidents and foreign ambassadors employ to establish amicable interpersonal and interstate relations. The infusion of elite discourse, institutional discourse, and initial interactions brought forth in our study a gamut of bonding strategies applied in the process of rapport management between state representatives. The president and ambassadors did their best to avoid sensitive issues and managed the attending audience as a resource for enhancing interpersonal relations, advancing the interaction, and solving problems at both the interstate and interpersonal levels. In the Conclusion we underline the importance of analyzing actual conversations between individuals who simultaneously embody themselves and their states in order to understand how relationships between large social entities are managed.

The first stage in grammaticalization is often an enrichment of pragmatic meaning. If a new form is more ‘extravagant’ or ‘expressive’, it may have a competitive advantage. The grammaticalizing form described here is a primitive ‘do’-support construction used to make questions, in an Italian dialect spoken in an isolated sub-Alpine valley. Living speakers describe why and when they would use ‘do’-support over the simpler, main-verb alternative. Logical meanings, which include an answer presupposition and perfective viewpoint on the event, suggest that the ‘do’-support form is a syntactically embedded, and pragmatically indirect question (Swinburne, 2021). The expressive meanings described here are: 1) those demonstrating prior thought (conventional presuppositions due to the syntactic structure); 2) subjective meanings expressing emotion and engaging the interlocutor (conventional implicatures of ‘do’); and 3) meanings exploiting indirectness for reasons of politeness (conversational implicatures). With ‘do’-support, the speaker is being polite and making an educated guess of the likely answer, while leaving open the possibility of being wrong. In the small, tight-knit, isolated communities of Val Camonica, politeness to neighbours is essential for long-term community cohesion. The politeness meaning has likely driven the grammaticalization.

This study explores pre-modern Chinese intellectuals’ identity construction through the choice of self-referring forms in their letters home. Based on a case study of Hu Shih's letters home, it categorizes the self-referring forms he used and self-identities he constructed, and further investigates the underlying sociocultural factors. It shows that Hu Shih employed four categories of self-referring forms, namely first-person pronouns, kinship terms, names, nicknames, and pen names, and appositive expressions. With these forms of self-reference, he constructed himself as a kin member, an independent person, and a scholar. Hu's construction of the first self-identity might have been influenced by the traditional family ethics and ideology prevalent within Chinese social structure, whereas that of the other two could be ascribed to the emerging social changes at the historical turning point, and scholarly principles. The study provides a new perspective for understanding traditional Chinese intellectuals’ letters home in the pre-modern society of China.

The current paper aims to discuss the impact of pre-posing a subordinate clause (as in connective p, q) on the overall meaning of a conjunction. This issue has traditionally been explored from a functional perspective and, more specifically, in relation to ‘topic’, ‘framework’ or other related notions. The current work reveals that, among the inadequacies that a topic-based account presents, it essentially falls short of a context-sensitive and unified perspective. In response to these inadequacies, a relevance-theoretic approach is proposed on procedural grounds. More specifically, it is argued that a sentence-initial subordinate clause, or, more accurately, the entire context associated with it, serves as evidence for the delivery of procedure r, namely the inference that the main-clause-proposition that may follow will be relevant to the foregoing pre-posed context. From a communicative point of view, the procedural impact of sentence-initial subordinate clauses is justified as a useful rhetorical instrument that serves to manipulate the hearer’s epistemic assessment of the main-clause-proposition as genuinely relevant to the context associated with the (pre-posed) subordinate-clause proposition.

This paper investigates how interspecies greeting routines between humans and horses/dogs are organized. The aim is to understand how humans and animals jointly organize ‘becoming socially co-present’ (Pillet-Shore, 2008). The data comprises 12 h of video recordings with 30 humans, 40 horses and 7 dogs participating in every-day activities such as walks, dinner parties and grooming sessions. Multimodal interaction analysis (e.g., Mondada, 2019) is used to investigate how humans and horses/dogs initiate and respond to greetings, and image based transcriptions of human and animal actions are used to avoid species hierarchy. The analyses reveal that humans and animals make a distinction between being physically co-present and socially co-present in interspecies interaction, and that all involved species take initiatives to greet and respond to such initiatives. The findings show both similarities and differences to human–human greetings, which is are addressed in a concluding discussion. By including animals’ systematic communicative actions in the investigation of social life and co-operative action we gain knowledge on how understanding both within and across species boundaries is achieved, which may have implications for how humanity views other living species on the planet.

Inference is central to pragmatic theories of meaning and communication, but most studies of inference to date have been undertaken in adjacent fields rather than in pragmatics. The aim of this special issue is to bring together pragmatic perspectives on inference in order to further our understanding of the role that inference - as both a product and a process - plays in pragmatic models of communication. This aim is realised through a set of six papers that collectively address key questions arising when we go beyond the traditional focus in pragmatics on inferences by the hearer about the speaker's intended meaning. These articles draw from a range of different methodological and theoretical standpoints to examine the inferential, interactional, and developmental processes that underpin different types of pragmatic inference. It is concluded that more sophisticated theoretical accounts of pragmatic inference are needed to account for the wide range of inferential phenomena that can be empirically observed in communication.

Timing is an important interactional resource for coordinating mobile and digital interactions, and for signalling interest and involvement in an exchange. This article breaks new ground in exploring conversational rhythm as a ‘disconnective’ resource through which people suspend, or withdraw from, interactions as a way of asserting agency and autonomy. Focusing on mobile-messaging apps such as WhatsApp, it develops an innovative ‘day-in-the-life’ methodological approach for exploring how individuals manage multiple online and offline encounters through combining interviews, time-use diaries and messaging data. Interactional analysis of selected extracts involving British women in their 40s and 50s points to an emerging interactive practice of ‘suspended alignment’ which enables connection-building through alignment while simultaneously keeping interlocutors at a desired distance. Suspended alignment is an increasingly accepted pragmatic norm through which adults maintain key relationships while managing the multiple demands on their time.

As in most other languages, clicks in Hebrew are not phonemes but still occur very frequently in speech. This Interactional Linguistic study, based on a corpus of casual Hebrew conversation, explores clicks at discourse unit junctures – prefacing topics, sequences, and their parts. We argue that the function of such clicks is best understood through Goffman's notion of ‘frame shifts,’ signalling changes in footing. Some frame-shifting clicks are byproducts of swallowing and breathing; at the same time, we show that click use is regular in certain contexts and interactionally significant, and that such clicks qualify as discourse markers. The tension between being non-linguistic epiphenomena and having a syntactic status is what makes frame-shifting clicks ‘liminal signs.’ Finally, we hypothesize that frame-shifting clicks are explainable as the result of a reanalysis in specific bridging contexts, whereby clicks-as-byproducts are conventionalized into discourse markers. This process may explain why non-phonemic clicks are so widespread across the world, and it may serve as a starting point for describing the development of additional interactional functions of clicks.